Discovering the Truth About The Deadly Four Ounces of Tai Chi Chuan

Tai Chi Chuan is Grand Ultimate Fist!

I always used to read pieces about how deadly the Chinese Martial Art of Tai Chi Chuan was. Of especial interest to me was the concept of destroying your opponent with just four ounces. Now this was a while ago, back when the martial arts were first being introduced to the United States. There wasn’t much in the way of pictures, and the text was pretty simplified, and all I saw in my mind was some oriental doing a mystical strike and the criminal attacker falling down unconscious.

Creating Chi

Sink, Breath, Make Tan Tien Glow!

Man, I thought about that. I mean, what kind of a punch uses just four ounces? And why not five ounces? Or three? What was the rare and mystical reasoning behind using just four ounces? Was four ounces some kind of sacred principle in the esoteric fantasyland of the eastern fighting disciplines?

Time went on, I studied Karate, and that was definitely not four ounce strikes. Man, the punches were designed to put the whole body weight into them. And the blocks were hefty things that would stop a charging elephant! And the kicks! Man, I don’t even want to go there! But Mas Oyama, it was rumored, could kill a bull and leave nothing but hamburger!

More time went on, and better articles were written, and even books on the subject, and I came to what I thought was the truth of this tai chi four ounce thing. You don’t hit the guy with four ounces, you lead him!

Oh! It wasn’t a strike at all! You just go along with the direction he is going in, help it out to the tune of a rather non mystical and arbitrary four ounces, and the guy falls on his face!

And I thought I had it all figured out.

Then, decades after learning how to knock down elephants with a karate punch, something interesting occurred. I got old. And, the older I got, the less force I had, and the less force I had, the more tricky I got, and I suddenly figured something out.

If you punch with your whole body, and take the effort out, and just punch an inch into the flesh, the whole body is going to react.

Interestingly, this was not very mystical.

A fellow on some college, you see, had a cell culture. He split it in two, and was walking one half the cell culture across the campus. Suddenly, he dropped his sample. The cells died.

So he went back to get the other half of the cells, and he found that those cells had died, too!

So, if you can figure out how to hit with the whole body, then take the effort out of the strike, and strike (with Chi) a part of the body, the whole body feels it.

And that is how you destroy an opponent with four ounces the Tai Chi Chuan Way.

For the scientific truth about Tai Chi Chuan, check out Five Army Tai chi Chuan at Monster Martial Arts.

free martial art book

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *